In this daring book of twenty-three poems,
Brodsky dramatically juxtaposes seemingly disparate subjects, in two
sections ("Peddler on the Road" and "The
Ashkeeper's Everlasting Passion Week"). The contrast is stark and
unnerving, but Brodsky manages to blend the workaday experiences and
reflections of an American Jewish traveling salesman, Willy Sypher, with
gruesome and poignant glimpses of the Holocaust, as seen through the
eyes of shattered survivors. This volume leaves the reader feeling the
weight that Jewishness imposes upon those who must endure anti-Semitism.

Praise:

Louis Daniel Brodsky's Holocaust-related poems are evocative, even hallucinatory;
they belong to a time that is still drowning in oceans of ashes.

No achievement
in his poetic career exceeds Louis Daniel Brodsky's creation of Willy
Sypher, a Jewish traveling salesman. Juxtaposing a series of poems about
Willy's career and a series of poems reflecting on the Nazi holocaust,
Brodsky projects a vision of Jewish history . . . that includes in its range
the comic compulsiveness of Willy's quest for sales and the unspeakable
horror of the death camps. No poet at work today has a more . . . passionate
regard for the infinite worth of the experience of being alive.